Just - just hold on a second. This is big: NVIDIA, maker of graphics accelerator chips, has just announced, during its keynote at CES, that it is developing a high-performance ARM-based processor together with ARM, targeted squarely at the desktop, server, and even high-performance computing markets. That Windows on ARM thing? NVIDIA referenced it multiple times! Update: Boom, and we have a press release. "NVIDIA announced today that it plans to build high-performance ARM based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers. Known under the internal codename 'Project Denver', this initiative features an NVIDIA CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU."

One merely needs to take the C++ source code and compile it for the ARM architecture which one is targetting. One thereby produces an ARM executable binary, not an x86 executable binary, for the exact same game application.

In theory, this approach should work fine. But in practice it's not going to be anywhere near as simple as that.

For instance, game producers could very well find themselves facing a situation in which they need to link their application against some third party library. If they've been linking to that library as an x86 binary, there's no guarantee that they'll be able to obtain corresponding binaries for ARM. Depending on the level to which they rely on that library, this could end up being a complete show stopper for many projects.